Tag: San Diego Asian Film Festival

Falling in Love Like in Movies (Jatuh Cinta Seperti Di Film-Film, Yandy Laurens, 2023)

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The screenwriter hero of meta rom-com Falling in Love Like in Movies (Jatuh Cinta Seperti Di Film-Film) seems intent to prove that romance can be just as fiery for the middle aged as it can for the average teenager even as his own love interest cautions him that grown-up love is much more considered. It’s mostly about long conversations and frank discussions about what you both do and don’t want rather the clumsiness and artificial barriers that disrupt the relationship between young lovers. She, and the film’s producer, wonder if an audience would find that very interesting, but there is of course something incredibly captivating about witty dialogue and a slow burn romance although that might not actually be quite how it turns out for the lovelorn screenwriter.

Or at least, Bagus (Ringgo Agus Rahman) wants to fall in love like the movies rather than like in real life. His chief idea is that he’s going to write a screenplay for a romance and then his old high school friend Hana (Nirina Zubir) will go to see it and understand it’s all about her so they’ll end up together the end. What it makes it all even more awkward, is that Hana is very recently widowed and Bagus’ clumsy pursuit of her is incredibly insensitive especially as he frames it as a kind of salvation, that he’s helping her to “move on” and escape the inertia of her grief.

Through his experiences, he may come to learn that he’s become stuck in his own head applying movie logic to real life and expecting people to behave the way they would in one of his screenplays in which he of course controls everything. Yet in another way the film is also a departure for him as it’s his first based on his own original idea as opposed to being an adaptation of a existing material. He later says that he’s writing it to try and understand something, yet it’s not until others read it that he begins to see himself reflected and dislike what he sees. His lead actor asks if he made himself this annoying on purpose, while the actress complains the movie Bagus is “cruel” and insensitive in his dismissal of Hana’s feelings little knowing that movie Bargus and writer Bargus are basically the same. 

What he’s left with is the gap between the fantasy of cinema and a more rational reality, the illusion of a romance like in the movies and the less glamorous process of getting to know someone gradually and putting love together piece by piece. On a baseline level, he’s emotionally immature and a little self-interested, unable to see that writing a screenplay as a roundabout confession of love is not romantic but cowardly and what’s really romantic is being present and honest about his feelings even if it’s all quite awkward and maybe a little bit inappropriate considering his love interest only lost her husband a few months previously and in any case has every right to reject future romance if that’s her choice.

Hana is in many way’s the film’s moral arbiter, though often framed within Bargus’ gaze as a tragic victim of her grief only to adopt the moral high ground in the final “reality” of the film. Laurens often wrongfoots us in his meta commentary, shifting from 2.35 black and white to letterboxed colour and structuring the film around title cards liked to screenwriting theory which ultimately pay off in Bargus’ ironic epiphany that actually he was the protagonist all along only he’d forgotten to give himself a character arc in his ongoing fixation on Hana’s supposed need to change. His screenplay is literally all about him, but he’s too close to it to see that his behaviour is not really acceptable off the page and if it’s romantic successes he’s after, he’ll have to recalibrate his idea of what romance is while pitching it to his producer boss and convincing him that it’s worth taking the risk on the smart sophistication of a witty rom-com about the gap between the magic of the movies and the difficult realities of love and loss in which going to the supermarket might be the most romantic thing you’ll ever do.

Falling in Love Like in Movies screens April 24th as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival Spring Showcase.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Old Fox (老狐狸 , Hsiao Ya-chuan, 2023)

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It’s all about “inequality”, according to the titular Old Fox (老狐狸, lǎohúli). Or at least knowing how to leverage it. Inequality is something that’s coming to bother the young hero of Hsiao Ya-chuan’s coming-of-age drama in which a small boy finds himself torn between two father figures, one a wily old slumlandlord with a heart of stone and the other his melancholy and disappointed but kindhearted father who simply endures the many blows that life has dealt him. 

Set in Taipei in 1989 shortly before an apocalyptic stock market crash in the post-martial law economy crushes the hopes of millions of ordinary people convinced to invest their savings, the film wastes no time in showing us the various inequalities in play in small alleyway of traditional stores all owned by Boss Xie (Akio Chen) whom many seem to regard as a kind of saviour even if he cares not at all about them. Jie’s (Bai Run-yin) father Tai-lai (Liu Kuan-ting) works in a local restaurant and rents a room above a beef noodle cafe for which he pays in cash every week to Miss Lin (Eugenie Liu), a pretty young woman working for Boss Xie and enjoying an unusual amount of power for someone of her age and gender for a society still somewhat conservative. 

Tai-lai has been patiently saving money so that he can afford to buy a house and open a hair salon which was the dream of his late wife, but obvlious to the world around him he hasn’t noticed that prices are continuing to rise placing his dream of homeownership further out of his reach. Meanwhile, Jie is bullied at school and called a “snitch” without understanding why or even what the word means. This sense powerlessness and inferiority maybe be why he’s drawn to Boss Xie, a man who does after all exude power if also a sense of menace and melancholy. Xie in turn sees in Jie a potential protégé, both a mirror of his younger self and an echo of the son he lost who rebelled against everything he represents.

Nicknamed Old Fox, Xie stands for everything that’s wrong with the contemporary society which is about to implode in the financial crash. Wounded by his childhood poverty in which he, like Jie, also pleaded with a local landlord to sell his mother a property, Xie has adopted a ruthlessly selfish disregard for the lives of others teaching Jie his mantra of “none of my damn business” while the boy develops a worrying admiration for the aura a man like Xie projects and actively enjoys the sensation that others fear him. While hanging out with Xie he comes to look down on men like his father whom Xie calls “losers” who care only for others and disregard themselves. Xie teaches him to leverage the inequalities of power and turn his enemies’ weakness back against them to increase his own strength placing him further at odds with Tai-lai’s innate goodness and down-to-earth humanity. 

Yet we can also see that Tai-lai has had a life of disappointment. A woman who comes into the restaurant (Mugi Kadowaki) now married to a thuggish local big wig is a former childhood sweetheart from whom he was separated by time and circumstance while it also seems that Miss Lin has taken a liking to him though he appears not to have noticed. At home he plays the saxophone and takes in tailoring while resigned to saving a little longer before he’ll finally be able to buy a house and achieve his dreams. Tai-lai is one of the few who does not play the stock market and is therefore free of the danger it represents while Jie soon becomes sick of his his father’s frugality in their regular practice of turning the boiler off after having a bath and keeping their taps on a slow drip so they don’t trip the water metre and longs to become a man like Boss Xie unafraid to exploit any advantage in complete disregard for the lives of others. 

A brief coda set in the present in the day suggests that the older Jie may have found a happy medium, at least disguising a genuine concern for the safety and happiness of others as being solely about profit, while Xie’s sadness and doubts about the path his life has taken are never far from the surface as the society teeters on the brink of financial disaster. Capturing a palpable sense of late ’80s Taipei the film has a nostalgic atmosphere but also an equally prescient quality in the things that are only half-visible to the younger Jie in the melancholy disappointments of the adults who surround him still struggling to reroot themselves in a new society while overburdened by the failures of the old.

Old Fox screens April 22nd as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival Spring Showcase.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Elegies (詩, Ann Hui, 2023)

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Many of the poets featured in Ann Hui’s documentary Elegies (詩) are keen to emphasise that poetry is rarely about what it says it’s about and often as much about what doesn’t say. The documentary is much the same, making a point about the power of poetry in an age resistance, an elegy for the disappearing Hong Kong the poets lament two of them no longer living in the city but somehow still defined by it. 

The tables reversed by one of her subjects, Hui explains that the documentary is a labour of love. She admits that it’s not a mainstream movie and that no one would fund it, but she decided to do it anyway despite or perhaps because of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic which is itself makes frequent appearances in the film. In any case, Hui splits her time mainly between veteran poet Huang Canran who now lives in Mainland China and his younger disciple Liu Wai Tong who lives in Taiwan. 

As Canran says, the poems prove his love for Hong Kong but he also feels as if it was Hong Kong that forced him to leave. Joking that he’s an economic exile, he explains that he mainly moved after being forced out by the rapid cost of living in the city. He cheerfully explains that being a poet means embracing destitution and is embarrassed about the other kinds of writing such as penning a newspaper column that he did solely for the money. Canran’s main source of income comes from translation though his personal motto is to work hard to not earn money while practicing his art. His daughter doesn’t really get it and is confused about why Ann Hui wants to make a documentary about her father, though as Canran admits prophets are rarely appreciated in their hometowns. The Hong Kong he writes about is another place, perhaps somewhere that never really existed or any rate exists no longer. 

A photographer and lecturer in poetry, Liu Wai Tong heads in a more philosophical direction while also living as an exile in Taipei, never quite explaining the reasons he left Hong Kong though perhaps because it would awkward to do so directly. He quotes Brecht and asks what the point of poetry is in an age of protest, how their voices can resonate among a thousand other horrors crying out for speech. Yet as other poets had said, poems about nature are not always about nature just as political poems are not always about politics. By saying one thing and not another they can make a message felt but then there’s nothing really wrong with talking about beauty amid myriad horrors. 

Another poet writes about the everyday, causing others to ask if you can really call it a poem if it’s just about the unexpected appearance of a cockroach. The words should be simple, they insist, their meaning at least clear even if the message is ambiguous. Obscurity for obscurity’s sake is always doomed to failure. Many of the poets write from their direct experience detailing their ordinary lives in the city while others rejoice in wordplay or metaphor, but Hong Kong colours all of their work. Echoing the other poets, Hui too admits that it’s poetry that sustained her in her darkest hours. The poems that she learned as a child gave her strength when she needed it. A woman who has been writing to a friend in prison is moved to tears on recalling his reaction to a poem she had sent him, feeling that poem if can touch someone years after it was written than it must have intrinsic meaning.

Thus poetry in itself becomes an act of resistance if solely in defiance and the determination to endure even the most difficult circumstances from the anxiety of a global pandemic to the spectre of political unrest and lingering oppression. At once an elegy for the Hong Kong the poets speak of and its many rueful exiles, the film makes a passionate defence of poetry as a lifeline thrown by one lonely soul to another across often turbulent seas and carrying with it a message most powerful in its silence. 

Elegies screened as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Small Fry (잔챙이, Park Joong-ha, 2023)

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A dejected actor begins to feel like a fish caught on a hook only to be cast back in Park Joong-ha’s tense chamber drama, Small Fry (잔챙이, Janchaengi). Small fry is how Ho-joon sees himself, at least in comparison to Hee-jin, an up and coming actress recently the star of a Netflix show though equally insecure in her career while each of them find themselves at the mercy of a director with a fragile sense of masculinity and a tendency to bully that masks his insecurity. 

Indeed, the tale opens as masculinity drama as former actor Ho-joon turns up at a fishing lake intending to record an episode for his YouTube fishing channel only there’s a weird guy hanging around that immediately tries to oust him from his position on hearing his patter about a tip off about the best seat from the guy in the shop. The man later revealed to be a film director, Nam, is obnoxious and prickly. Not content with having forced Ho-joon to move, he loudly complains about the noise from his live-streaming using it as an excuse for not having caught any fish. 

You’d think it would be an unwritten rule that touching another guy’s rod is inappropriate, yet a third man soon turns up while Ho-joon is taking a break and messes with his equipment apparently resentful of his status as a top YouTuber insisting that he’s “cheating” by using Japanese techniques and his success is entirely down to the Japanese-style paste he uses for bait. The same man turns up later but obsequiously plays the devoted fan, asking for an autograph much to the consternation of the all but ignored director and his star who has also tagged along. 

Nam evidently feels threatened by Ho-joon’s relative fame along with genuine fishing skills, petulantly rejecting his hints like a man who won’t ask for directions while Hee-jin, the actress, grows ever more exasperated wanting to keep Ho-joon around if only as a buffer between herself and Nam who she realises had ulterior motives for this trip. Then again as it turns out each of these three people is connected in unexpected ways that play into the drama between them as well as into that of the screenplay for the film Hee-jin has all but been promised the lead for. 

Repeated fishing metaphors suggest that both Ho-joon and Hee-jin are just waiting to reel in their big break while at the mercy of the dupliciotous Nam who never catches anything. Gradually He-jin realises that he may already have given the part to another, more famous, actress while continuing to string her along. He later makes a kind of promise to Ho-joon to consider him for the male lead, but as expected blames the drink and feigns ignorance once the sun has risen. Yet even Nam claims he’s at the mercy of others, insisting that there are times when you just need to tell the producers to “fuck off” while secretly placating them in preparing to cast an actress with a profile over one with the skills to do the job. 

They’re all small fry, just waiting around trying chomp on a hook and get reeled into something good but finding that they move too quickly or that even if they’re caught they’re soon thrown back in favour of bigger fish. At 40, Ho-joon is beginning to feel as if he’s missed his chance and his fishing-themed YouTube channel may be all he’s got left even as he’s forced to play another kind of role humiliating himself filming sponsored ads for bait manufacturers to earn his keep. “There are too many ordinary people like you,” Nam cruelly tells him affecting an authority he doesn’t really have to suggest he has no future as an actor. Hee-jin, meanwhile, is wondering if it’s worth putting up with Nam’s false promises in the hope of finally getting her big break even if her management still won’t let her do the films she really wants to do. 

Yet in some senses, Ho-joon is still on the hook hoping he can reel something in while Hee-jin may have decided that her big break’s not worth all this bullshit and there will other opportunities or perhaps it doesn’t really matter even if there aren’t. Maybe it really is all about the paste after all and a poor fisherman like Nam is likely to end up with nothing in the end while at least Ho-joon and Hee-jin though small fry they may be have a better idea of which lines to cast. 

Small Fry screened as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

One Second Ahead, One Second Behind (1秒先の彼, Nobuhiro Yamashita, 2023)

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If you’re a step ahead and someone else is a step behind, then the gap between you ought to be twice as big but in an odd kind of way it can bring you closer. At least, that’s how it is for the protagonists of Nobuhiro Yamashita’s One Second Behind, One Second Ahead (1秒先の彼, Ichibyo Saki no Kare), a remake of the Taiwanese rom-com My Missing Valentine scripted by Kankuro Kudo. 

Kudo wisely avoids some of the awkwardness of the original by reversing the genders of the misaligned romantics so that it’s now male post office worker Hajime (Masaki Okada) who wakes up to realise that he’s lost an entire day while having no recollection of how he got sunburnt or why there’s sand in his trousers. The host of a radio show he’s fond of listening to asks him about something he’s lost, causing him to remember his father who went out one evening for ginger and then never came back. Hajime’s problem is that he’s always a little ahead of himself, in too much of a hurry to fully grasp the situation around him. That might be one reason that he falls so hard for singer-songwriter Sakura (Rion Fukumuro) and becomes far more invested in the relationship than might be wise for someone you’ve only just met. 

Reika (Kaya Kiyohara), meanwhile, is always a little bit behind. Shy and somewhat reserved she struggles to get her words out and while Hajime has often left before the end of a conversation she is usually left hanging by an inattentive or impatient partner. Out of sync with the world around them, they have each lost something precious besides the obvious and are looking for a way to get it back. Kudo’s script largely drops the magical realism of the Taiwanese original with its strange world of talking lizards and opts for something a little less surreal if just as sweet while maintaining the borrowed time motif that suggests the universe is fair and willingly adjusts itself so that those who find themselves missing out will get that time back though there’s not a lot they can do with it other than reflect. 

Even so within this miraculous dream space regrets can in a sense be cured and anxieties worked out. Those awake to stopped time have the opportunity to set things right, or at least to say their piece even if no one else can hear. There’s something more than time that they can recover, though it may be only small comfort and offer little more than one-sided closure. Rather than the Valentine’s Day setting of the Taiwanese original Kudo and Yamashita shift the action to the summer which with its many fireworks displays has a rather poignant quality focussed more on the loss than the rediscovery while emphasising the short-lived quality of human relationships which can nevertheless leave a warm afterglow even if the memory itself has been lost. 

Setting the film in the historical city of Kyoto also adds to the magical feel, the emerging sunlight at one point appearing almost like a halo around the head of a frozen Hajime while he perhaps comes to accept his mother’s rationale that his father did not leave him but ran away from reality and ironically a world he felt he could not keep up with. In a repeated gag, Hajime calls up a requests show and pours his heart out to the host only for his mother to dial in and dispute everything he’s says especially reminding him that he’s not a loser but should slow down a bit and at least listen to the end of the conversation. Reika meanwhile might have to work herself up to speedier means of communication than the good old fashioned letter but can at least see that she gets there in the end even if it might take a little longer than for others. 

Despite the differences between them, they are in fact perfectly in sync and just waiting for the times to align to bring them back together. Kudo and Yamashita lend their quirky romance a melancholy and heartwarming quality, steering clear of the awkwardness of the otherwise sweet and wholesome Taiwanese original in suggesting that the “date” at the film’s centre is the fulfilment of long forgotten promise rather than the momentary whim of a lovelorn romantic. Suggesting that the things you lose cycle back to you and that the universe itself is fair and kind, the film’s pure-hearted romanticism offers a hopeful reassurance that in the end it all really will work out for the best if only you give it time.

One Second Ahead, One Second Behind screens Nov. 4/5 as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

As If It’s True (John Rogers, 2023)

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An influencer enters into a mutually exploitative relationship with a vulnerable musician only to find herself falling for him for real, or perhaps not, in John Rogers’ non-rom-com As if It’s True. Taking aim at the wilful inauthenticity of influencer culture, Rogers explores the ways in which romance is really just performance while mutually beneficial relationships can nevertheless contain a power imbalance that adds to their emotional volatility. 

It could be said that Gem (Ashley Ortega) is permanently on the rebound. A subject of a viral meme after an ex filmed her having a mental breakdown after being fired from her job, Gem went on to harness her fame becoming a popular YouTube vlogger. But then fame seems to have got the better of her. Gem’s girlfriend Yara left amid rumours of her toxic behaviour and her feeds are now full of trolls berating her. Hoping to recapture the magic, Gem recruits Anthony to be her “boyfriend” though he soon tires of the arrangement, taking up with Gem’s friend Cielo.

Anthony resents the limitations placed on his romantic freedom by his empty relationship with Gem, though it seems that she may at least have harboured some “genuine” feelings for him. At a Halloween party, Gem meets melancholy musician James (Khalil Ramos) who is wearing the same Harry Potter costume as she is and undergoes a moment of romance that is equal parts flirtation and role play. A photographer asks them if they’re a couple and they don’t quite know how to respond but then each accept the label. It’s here that things start to get weird as Gem asks James to punch Anthony. He jokingly agrees but didn’t think she was serious, until she offered to compensate him for his efforts. 

The original meeting is then consumed in confusion and contradiction in which neither party is entirely sure what was really going on between them aside from a genuine sense of attraction. Gem wants James to get back at Anthony and also boost her ratings, while James seems like he’s interested in a more genuine romance but captivated by Gem’s wealth and illusionary power. The pair find themselves playacting romance for the cameras, coming up with a fake story of how they met while filming a series of couples moments to prove how in love they are. 

But the flaw in the plan is that the fans don’t take to James, seeing him as bland and taking an instant dislike to his coffee-shop style music. James begins to worry that Gem won’t like him if the fans don’t, while she becomes fed up with what she sees as his lack of drive. A climactic dinner tables fight provokes a series of harsh words on both sides as James complains he’s nothing but a pawn in Gem’s game and she accuses him of being a golddigger yet the rawness of the fight suggests two people who can’t be honest with themselves about how they feel let alone with each other.

Rogers plays with our own ability to discern the reality, leaving us unsure which scenes might be “real” and which are simply part of the skit. Trapped in Gem’s confusing world of inauthenticity, James begins to lose grip on himself, lost in a kind of dream world while Gem exploits his insecurity to prank him by suggesting she may leave him for another woman. They each at times claim that the relationship is now “real” and they’ve developed genuine feelings for each other but seemingly can’t quite accept them or escape from the performative quality of their romance.

As much becomes plain when Anthony and Ceilo get engaged, Cielo looking a little sheepish showing off the ring while implying that James must have something up his sleeve to one-up Anthony in the romance stakes, further fuelling his sense of jealous resentment and fragile masculinity. Even a “real” relationship is also performative in its empty gestures such as random flowers and cheerful selfies. Gem puts on act to meet James’ mother, but then who isn’t on their best behaviour to meet a potential in-law? She ends up liking her, finding something in her that her own parental figures may have lacked in the childhood trauma she shares only with James (or so she claims) that explains why she is the way she is. 

James has also had his fair share of mental health issues, something Gem recklessly exploits in getting him to make a video in which he “opens up”, while otherwise growing tired of feeling like Gem’s pet just trotted out to look cute on the internet while his attempts to use her to further his music career largely flounder. Then again, we have to wonder about the authenticity of what we’re seeing as Gem once again seems primed to put something together in the great highlight real of their “relationship”. Perhaps this is all a bit too, Gem “coming clean” about her real fake romance with James seemingly nowhere to be seen. Raw and embittered, Rogers’ anti-rom-com resents the digitalisation of love in which romance has become a public act defined by deed rather than feeling and the fake affirmation of social media clout has itself begun to trump human connection.

As If It’s True screens Nov. 3 as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Ma, I Love You (真爱好妈, Chiu Keng Guan, 2023)

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A single mother experiences separation anxiety when she discovers her teenage daughter plans to study abroad in Chiu Keng Guan’s heartwarming drama, Ma, I Love You (真爱好妈). While the daughter yearns for freedom, she is also understandably wary of heading out into the world alone and as much as she fears her mother’s sometimes worryingly obsessive love also recognises that it’s costing her own freedom in her inability to rediscover something to live for outside her daughter.

The bond between the pair is unusually strong in part because of the father’s early death in an accident at the beach which has left Bee Ling clingy and over protective. Now 18, Qi Qi is acutely embarrassed by her mother’s habit of turning up unannounced when she’s out with her friends while insisting on driving her everywhere rather than letting her drive herself or take public transport. That’s one reason that she hasn’t told her she’s given up her part-time job to take French lessons and has applied to study at a university in France. 

It’s obviously a big adjustment for Bee Ling who has devoted her entire life to raising her daughter. Even her job as an insurance agent for which she has won countless awards as a top employee is something she’s only worked hard at to provide for Qi Qi with the end goal of buying a home where they can live together. As her friends and family try to point out to her, children aren’t meant to live with their parents forever and Qi Qi isn’t a child anymore. She wants her own life and the freedom to explore, while Bee Ling should also have the freedom to find new interests and ways to fulfil herself. 

While her friend Li Yan is excited about the idea of her son Zi Hao studying overseas, Bee Ling tries to do whetever she can to prevent Qi Qi going including visiting a shrine to pray that she fails the interview before boldly stating that she will simply go to France with her which is the opposite of what Qi Qi wanted. “I want to go to a place without you” she rather bluntly states, trying to get through to her mother that she wants to be free of her helicopter parenting. 

But then Qi Qi is perhaps a little more anxious than she makes out and afraid to head out on her own without her mother to look out for her. Following a series of setbacks, she appears to have given up walking blankly through an apartment Bee Ling wanted to buy vacantly replying that she’s happy to go with whatever her mother decides. Even Bee Ling is by this point a little less controlling, looking for a place with similar sized rooms and keen that Qi Qi decide how she wants to decorate her space but is also still quite dependent on her daughter not really knowing what she’d do with herself without her.

Ironically, through her campaign to frustrate Qi Qi’s plans to study abroad, Bee Ling begins to develop new interests and make new friends. An older French woman living in their building explains to her that life began again for her at 70. Her children are grown up with lives of their own, so why shouldn’t she be free to live as she pleases? Meanwhile, Bee Ling’s mother also begins to reflect that perhaps she made the same mistake coloured by the times in which they lived thinking that a girl should stay at home. She now regrets what might have been and sees that Bee Ling’s mistaken attempts to stop Qi Qi going abroad will only bring harm to them both.

In any case, as the title implies the pair eventually discover a way to rebalance their relationship with Qi Qi reflecting on the difficulties her mother faced raising her alone and Bee Ling discovering a new sense of possibility for the future in setting her daughter free. Together they begin to move past the shared trauma of the sudden loss of Qi Qi’s father while ready to embrace new challenges. “Life is elsewhere,” Bee Ling is told by a French teacher, suddenly finding herself ready to look for it while allowing her daughter to do the same.

Ma, I Love You screens Nov. 3/4th as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

San Diego Asian Film Festival Announces Full Programme for 2023

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The San Diego Asian Film Festival returns to cinemas Nov. 2 – 11 with another packed programme of recent hits from across the region and its diaspora. This year’s programme opens with Quiz Lady starring Awkwafina and Sandra Oh while coming-of age-comedy Mustache will bring the event to a close on Nov. 11.

Here’s a rundown of the East Asian movies included in this year’s programme:

China

  • 100 Yards – martial arts drama set in 1920s Tianjin.
  • All Ears – meta drama revolving around a screenwriter who now writes eulogies.
  • Farewell My Concubine – Chen Kaige classic following two opera performers over 50 years of turbulent history.
  • Youth (Spring) – Wang Bing turns his camera on the mostly young workers in the textile factories of Zhili. Review.

Hong Kong

  • Elegies – Ann Hui documentary exploring Hong Kong’s literary scene.
  • Mad Fate – a fortune teller attempts to change the fate of a young man destined to kill in Soi Cheang’s darkly comic cosmic mystery thriller. Review.

Japan

  • Evil Does Not Exist – latest from Ryusuke Hamaguchi (Drive My Car) focussing on a construction project in a peaceful rural village.
  • Monster – latest from Hirokazu Koreeda starring Sakura Ando as a mother who confronts a teacher after noticing changes in her son’s behaviour.
  • One Second Ahead, One Second Behind – Japanese remake of My Missing Valentine directed by Nobuhiro Yamashita and scripted by Kankuro Kudo following a boy who is always too early for everything and a girl who is always late.
  • River – the staff of a hotel along with its guests find themselves trapped in an infinite two minute loop in Junta Yamaguchi’s strangely poignant farce. Review.
  • Typhoon Club – a collection of frustrated teens find themselves trapped within a literal storm of adolescence in Shinji Somai’s seminal youth drama. review.

Korea

  • Cobweb – an insecure filmmaker becomes entangled within the movie in his mind in Kim Jee-woon’s homage to golden age Korean cinema. Review.
  • Concrete Utopia – post-apocalyptic drama following survivors living in the only remaining towerblock.
  • In Our Day – Hong Sang-soo drama starring Kim Min-hee as a retired actor
  • In Water – experimental Hong Sang-soo in which an aspiring filmmaker goes to the seaside.
  • Killing Romance – A once famous actress sets out to reclaim her autonomy from an abusive, controlling, billionaire husband in Lee Won-suk’s hilariously off the wall comedy. Review.
  • Sleep – horror in which a newly wed husband says he can see an intruder in his sleep.
  • Small Fry – indie drama in which a film director squares off against a top fisherman.

Malaysia

  • Abang Adik – displaced brothers find themselves trapped on the margins of a prosperous city in Jin Ong’s gritty drama. Review
  • Ma, I Love You – a mother enters a crisis when she discovers her daughter wants to study abroad.
  • Tiger Stripes – femininst pre-teen body horror in which a young woman begins to change in unexpected ways.

Philippines

  • As if It’s True – an influencer embarks on a “fake” romance for clicks only for the lines to be blurred.

Singapore

  • Wonderland – drama in which an old man sells his house to finance his daughter studying abroad.

Taiwan

  • Ah Fei – drama following the life of a woman over a series of decades.
  • Day Off – the wholesome small-town values of an ageing hairdresser place her increasingly at odds with her cynical consumerist kids in Fu Tien-Yu’s poignant tale of changing times. Review.

Thailand

  • You & Me & Me – identical twins consider an inevitable separation on the eve of the Millennium in Wanweaw Hongvivatana and Weawwan Hongvivatana’s quirky Thai comedy. Review.

Vietnam

The San Diego Asian Film Film Festival runs Nov. 2 – 11 at venues across the county. Full details for all the films are available via the official website where you can also find ticketing links and screening information, and you can keep up with all the latest news by following the festival on Facebook,  X (formerly known asTwitter), Instagram, and YouTube.

Finding Her Beat (Dawn Mikkelson & Keri Pickett, 2022)

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“We belong here, we deserve this.” It might sound like a redundant statement, but there are many reasons why the subjects of Dawn Mikkelson & Keri Pickett’s mostly observational documentary Finding Her Beat might have come to doubt their right to practice their art if not that simply to be who they are. As the opening text relates, taiko drumming has long been a male preserve and even if women were not expressly forbidden from playing conventional notions of femininity often forbad them. 

That’s in part the reason that Jennifer Weir, director of TaikoArts Midwest, embarked on the HERbeat project aiming to bring together female taiko players from the US, Japan, and around the world for a collaborative performance in Minneapolis. As Jennifer reveals, she is a Korean-American adoptee and had no particular reason to embrace taiko but like many of the other women who come to participate in the event, she has found a new home and community as a taiko drummer. The same is true for her wife, Megan, who once lived with a taiko drumming group in Japan before returning to the US and starting a family. 

Conversely, Chieko Kojima who is a founding member of the prominent taiko group Kodo on Sado Island explains that taiko gained a resurgence in the post-war era as young Japanese people looked for a way to rediscover traditional Japanese culture as a rejection of growing American cultural influence. Chieko herself had wanted to drum, but women were not really welcome to do so and so she became a dancer. Kaoly Asano’s practice at Gocoo is conversely rooted in post-war avant-garde performance art and incorporates other elements of traditional Shinto dance along with more modern influences such as trance and tecnho music. 

In a sense, their involvement with taiko is also a means of recovering a traditional culture that has often been mediated through a fiercely patriarchal society. Though there is no direct prohibition on women playing the taiko drums as there might be for entering a sumo ring, it has often been associated with masculinity as a celebration of physical strength and endurance. Socially enforced notions of gender therefore made it difficult for women to participate lest they be thought unfeminine and therefore unmarriageable particularly in ages in which marriage was the only secure path to a comfortable life for a woman. 

Many of the taiko players also mention that they have felt displaced within their societies, sometimes because those societies too did not accept their gender presentation or sexuality. They have all, however, found a source of solidarity as members of a taiko drumming group which is after all about togetherness and harmony. “In a way, taiko gave me a family” echoes Koaly Asano, “by meeting you, Tiffany, I finally felt I was not alone.” she affirms while talking to US-based taiko master Tiffany Tamaribuchi. For Asano, taiko is also a force that connect us with a place and the rhythms of the Earth. “What’s important is your sound, to transform your life into sounds” she adds as a kind of manifesto for her taiko. 

In a way it’s this sound translation that allows the women to come together, overcoming language barriers to find a common voice. Nevertheless, they are faced with a series of additional challenges including the looming coronavirus pandemic with the concert scheduled for February 2020. The show turns out to be the second to last staged in its venue for the almost two years of pandemic-related restrictions, while many of the drummers have already had future gigs cancelled in their home countries. All of which lends the concert an additional an additional weight and poignancy as the drummers prepare to claim a space only to have it taken away yet again. Nevertheless, the project does allow them to rediscover an international sense of solidarity along with individual pride in the practice of their art. Fittingly enough, the concert ends with a routine titled “Eijanaika?” which is both a reference to a carnivalesque protest movement during the Meiji Restoration, and a phrase which might be translated as “so what, what’s wrong with that?” neatly echoing the celebratory sense of defiance at the heart of HERbeat.

Finding Her Beat screened as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival Spring Showcase.

Trailer

The Bride with White Hair (白髮魔女傳, Ronny Yu, 1993)

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“This is the so-called underworld rule. You have no choice.” the hero of Ronny Yu’s gothic fairytale The Bride White Hair (白髮魔女傳) is told, only to reflect “Yes, I do.” though the world will eventually prove him wrong. Tinged with handover anxiety, the film finds its star-crossed lovers longing to exercise their choice of exile, to be allowed to live quietly outside of the political turbulence that surrounds them. But in the end their love is not strong enough to overcome their difference and doubt becomes the ultimate act of emotional betrayal. 

This is a tale that signals its tragedy from its inception. The Ching emperor is deathly ill and only a flower growing on a distant mountain that blossoms only once every 20 years can save him. “This flower is not for you” the emissaries are told by man who appears to be frozen in more ways than one, relating that he has waited 10 years for a woman who may have forgotten him. As a young man, Yi-hang (Leslie Cheung) was the roguish heir to the Wu Tang clan whose recklessness sometimes caused him to behave in unorthodox ways in the name of justice. The eight clans of Chung Yuan are beset on both sides, caught between the conflict of Ching and Ming while fearful of an “Evil Cult” that otherwise destabilises their icy grip over the local area. 

It’s becoming clear to Yi-hang that he may not be on the right side. The people are oppressed and starving but their attempt to procure a little sustenance for themselves leads to a bloody raid with clan soldiers cutting down peasants until a mysterious woman in white (Brigitte Lin) arrives wielding a whip that can cut people in half. Interrupted by a tragic scene while napping in the forest, Yi-hang is immediately smitten with the female assassin whom he later realises is the same girl he saw as a child who saved him from wolves with the song of her flute. 

The woman is an orphan taken in by the cult and trained up as an assassin. She has only a surname, Lien, and is then symbolically “reborn” when Yi-hang gives her her name, Ni-chang. Having fallen in love, the pair vow to leave the underworld together and live in the pastoral paradise of the watering hole where they first made love. “This underworld doesn’t belong to us, let them fight for it” Yi-hang insists, attempting to exercise his choice to escape a system he sees as corrupt before it strains his integrity but as he’ll discover he’s not as much choice as he thought. 

In the shadow of the Handover, it might be tempting to read Lien and Yi-hang as ordinary people who just want to live quietly and resent the intrusion of politics into their lives, though they remain caught between two opposing powers with no neutral space for them to occupy. The same could be said of the cult’s leaders, a pair of crazed conjoined twins, one male one female, who are fused at the back in a potent symbol of duality. The twins were once members of the Wu Tang clan but were betrayed and exiled, driven mad by their banishment. At the film’s conclusion, Yi-hang symbolically frees the twins by splitting them apart but their separation leads only to their deaths. In the end, Yi-hang betrays his love because the underworld does not permit it to exist. He doubts Lien’s word and his rejection of her sparks her metamorphosis into the title’s Bride with White Hair, a vengeful spirit of hurt and rage now condemned to eternal wandering just as Yi-hang is condemned to life a waiting only to watch a flower wither and die knowing that he has damned himself. 

Yu’s world of melancholy romanticism is typical of that of early ‘90s wuxia though carries a touch of the gothic not least in the Bride’s cobweb-like hair which eventually becomes her finest weapon. The pervading sense of longing seems to hint at a future act of imperfect union, tinged with volatile ambivalence but perhaps finally suggesting that this romance is doomed to failure because the corruption of the world into which Yi-hang, the authority, was born is simply too great to be conquered by the innocence of his love. 

The Bride with White Hair screens screens at UltraStar Cinemas Mission Valley April 23 as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival Spring Showcase.

Trailer (English subtitles)